566 NATURE CROWNED IN MAN 



to call Man's ^' very existence an accident ". There may be 

 accidents in evolution, though we think there are few, but 

 they do not last for two millions of years. An ascent that 

 has probably occupied between two and three millions of 

 years is not well described as " a brief and transitory epi- 

 sode ". Man may have been the greatest of mutations, but 

 there is no scientific warrant for regarding him as a freak. 

 He is congruent with antecedent and collateral evolution to- 

 wards higher nervous organisation. 



In the same way we cannot admit that Huxley was talking 

 good science when he insisted that Man's only chance of 

 ethical progress was to combat the cosmic process. He made 

 this antithesis because he saw in Nature a vast gladiatorial 

 show, a ubiquitous Ishmaelitism, every living creature for 

 itself and extinction taking the hindmost. He made man a 

 stranger in Nature by failing to appreciate adequately the 

 fact that throughout the struggle for existence in Nature 

 there is often a pathway to survival and success through 

 increased co-operation, kindness, and mutual aid, as well as 

 through increased competition and self-assertion. Along the 

 line of combination and mutual aid Man has made some 

 of his greatest advances, and this line was indicated, as it 

 were, by Nature to him. 



We have already asked whether there is not an ethical 

 finger-post in Nature's strategy that the individual living 

 creature realises itself in its inter-relations, and has to sub- 

 mit to being lost that the welfare of the whole may be served. 

 There is much indeed to be said for the thesis (which Prof. 

 Patrick Geddes has maintained) that the ideals of ethical 

 progress — through love and sociality, co-operation and sacri- 

 fice, may be interpreted as the highest expressions of the cen- 

 tral evolutionary process of the natural world. 



